Dear Kaleid Ladies,
Good morning! Thank you for being with us on our “To Be Made Well” summer journey.
Where do you need healing today?
What parts of you feel like they need a salve to cover them, to protect your wounds so that the work of healing can take its time?
Time is a critical component of healing.
In this email series, we are learning that the word “salvation” in the Scriptures is also a Greek word “sozo,” related to healing. God’s salvation includes making us well. We need God to tend to the wounds of our lives…physical and emotional, relational and spiritual.
In our contemplative times, we are talking about postures and practices for receptivity to God’s healing and the time that healing often takes. This week we consider the posture of abiding the practice of abiding through what we call the “Three S’s” – Silence, Solitude, and Stillness.
When was the last time you were really with someone—in the moment, fully engaged with your senses, content that the other pressing needs of life could wait? To be truly with another is an experience that seems to both undo a sense of time while highlighting the reality of a particular moment in time. Jesus came as God-with-us, perennially with us and poignantly with us in our moments of need.
Jesus’ invitation is to a life of being with him. He calls it abiding.
Remember the story of the bleeding woman? She wanted healing and even believed Jesus had it for her, but her approach was hit-and-run. She didn’t expect to even make eye-contact with the Healer; she just touched his robe. But Jesus wanted to be with her. He looked for her and then asked for her whole story, presumably taking the time to listen to the entire thing in an unhurried way (even though the crowd was pushing him toward Jarius’ home and daughter).
Jesus wants to be with us as he heals us. He’s not in a hurry. We don’t need to be either.
A Practice for Today
Today, we invite you to take the posture of abiding by engaging silence, solitude, and/or stillness. When we slow ourselves, we can be open to the timeliness and the timelessness of God’s healing presence. To be with God in this way is to allow him to apply healing salve and to let that salve protect and nourish our tender places during our healing journey.
What follows is a way into the posture and the practice, if you’d like to take fifteen or so minutes to enter into Jesus’ invitation to abide by practicing silence, stillness, and solitude.
First, set aside a fifteen-minute space today to be alone and quiet, uninterrupted to the best of your ability. Note it on your calendar and give yourself permission to take the time.
When the time comes, ask the Holy Spirit to settle you as you become present to yourself. You can do this through a grounding exercise like noticing five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. Or, you may want to just breathe deeply eight times, noting your thoughts and feelings but staying with your breathing.
Next, read the scripture below through, twice, slowly. Pause for a few minutes in between readings. What word or phrase stands out to you? Where is the Holy Spirit taking a highlighter to this passage?
Finally, set a timer for five minutes. Stay in the silence, stillness, and solitude. Rest. Breathe. If you sense an invitation from God, lean into that. If you experience the time as empty or agitated, see if you can be open to that, too.
Close your time by receiving this blessing: “God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.” – Julian of Norwich
The Scripture:
John 15
4 “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can’t bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can’t bear fruit unless you are joined with me.
5-8 “I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing. Anyone who separates from me is deadwood, gathered up and thrown on the bonfire. But if you make yourselves at home with me and my words are at home in you, you can be sure that whatever you ask will be listened to and acted upon. This is how my Father shows who he is—when you produce grapes, when you mature as my disciples.
9-10 “I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you’ll remain intimately at home in my love. That’s what I’ve done—kept my Father’s commands and made myself at home in his love.”
We love you!
The Kaleid Team
P.S. - For more on silence and solitude, learn from author and spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton about the practice as well as her own journey with it.
Photos: Photo by Rachel Cheng on Unsplash// Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Comments